One of the most impressive instruments at NAMM this year wasn’t new: it was the Zendrum, a spectacular handmade MIDI drum controller. The Zendrum has been evolving gradually since the 1980s, but it’s brought to life by the latest drum samples in FXpansion‘s BFD drum sample library. That’s the fascinating thing that’s happening: as sample […]

Sometimes you wish you could just take something off the NAMM show floor and put it in your suitcase. Such was the case with the padKONTROL, 4×4 triggering hardware from Korg complete with an X/Y touchpad and incredible customizability. Why am I thinking about this now? Because I sure could use it on some tracks […]

VJing and jamming with Pitfall, controlled from MIDI drums? Heck, yes!Max/MSP/Jitter is a multimedia environment that also happens to be a development tool, the upshot being that you can do bizarre things like emulate the chips of Atari, Sega, Nintendo, and Coleco game systems (covered previously). Now imagine you could turn those emulations into a […]

Updated: This story incorrectly stated the upgrade price for Serato Pitch & Time was US$99; it’s US$399. Apple is now shipping its 7.2 update to Logic Pro, well ahead of schedule. (It was originally slated for March.) As Steve Jobs touted in the keynote, this crossgrade will deliver Universal binary support for Intel processors. But […]

It seems we weren’t the only ones surprised by Logic 7.2 shipping early — only, if you’re a plug-in developer trying to finish a Universal Binary for the new Intel Macs, you might not be so pleasantly surprised. Such seems to be the case with Audio Damage who planned to finish plug-ins in time for […]

If you frequent experimental music concerts and performance art events, you might have seen them: mysterious, spherical and polyhedronalish speaker arrays, looking a bit like an unmanned space probe or an alien soccer ball. Now you can have one of your very own: Electrotap has announced they’re shipping the Hemisphere speaker array. And forget the […]

How would you sell guitar amp and effects software? In the fall, we watched IK Multimedia resort to the usual, sexist approach: hire a supermodel and make some pun on amp “modeling.” Native Instruments is taking a different approach, showing different ways conventional amps can kill you. Not since the Spinal Tap drummers has on-screen […]

Geeky, powerful (if tricky to master), free — it’s Csound 5. This audio program, which can trace its lineage directly to the first ever digital audio synthesis tool, doesn’t get major upgrades that often. So the just-released version 5 upgrade is big news, if nothing else because it makes Csound interoperable with lots of other […]

I’m sad to report that composer and artist Nam June Paik died Sunday evening January 29 at his home in Miami. The funeral will be this Friday here in New York; information at the Nam June Paik Website. Contributions can be sent to Electronic Arts Intermix, the nonprofit arts organization devoted to digital art and […]

Okay, Sony PSP owners: get ready to make still more noise. We’ve just seen another major release for the superb PSP Rhythm 3 drum machine. Now, get ready for a PSP sequencer: PSP Seq Ver 0.00 has begun development with basic sequencing functionality all in place. Features are bare-bones — song and sound design functionality […]